The moan of the whip-poor-will from the hillside; the boding cry of the tree-toad, that harbinger of storm; the dreary hooting of the screechowl.
Washington IrvingHistory is but a kind of Newgate calendar, a register of the crimes and miseries that man has inflicted on his fellow-man.
Washington IrvingThe Indians with surprise found the mouldering trees of their forests suddenly teeming with ambrosial sweet; and nothing, I am told, can exceed the greedy relish with which they banquet for the first time upon this unbought luxury of the wilderness.
Washington IrvingThere is nothing in England that exercises a more delightful spell over my imagination than the lingerings of the holiday customs and rural games of former times. They recall the pictures my fancy used to draw in the May morning of life, when as yet I only knew the world through books, and believed it to be all that poets had painted it; and they bring with them the flavour of those honest days of yore, in which, perhaps with equal fallacy, I am apt to think the world was more home-bred, social, and joyous than at present.
Washington Irving